Today we are happy to release our newest WordPress Magazine Theme Zuki. Zuki is a super flexible, minimal theme with a custom Front page option that enables you to create your own Magazine or news site layout in just a few simple steps.

We created a number of special Front page widget areas and custom Zuki Recent posts widgets for the Front page. You can drag’n’drop the widgets in the different widget areas and build your own Front page layout with big featured posts, smaller multi-column posts or highlighted posts with a custom background color.

Of course Zuki also offers a default blog layout with a content and right aligned sidebar area, so that the theme can also just be used as a classic, minimal and responsive blog theme.

The Custom Front Page

Just like in a big online Magazine or Newspaper website, Zuki offers a wide variety and flexibility to feature posts on the custom Zuki Front page. You can show featured posts in a slider at the top of your front page, only use the a two-column layout, create big one-column featured posts and teaser smaller posts in the different widget areas.

The Zuki Front Page offers a huge variety of layout options.

To offer a lot of different layout options the Zuki comes with three big, one-column widget areas(top, middle and bottom), as well as two content & sidebar widget areas in between (Post Content 1 / Sidebar 1 and Post Content 2 / Sidebar 2).

Of course you don’t need to use all widget areas and post widgets. You can just use the widget areas that let you create the layout you can have in mind for your Front page. This way almost all Zuki themes will look a little different and you can create a very individual website without a lot of work. Here is an overview of the Zuki Front page widget areas:

Zukis Custom Post Widgets

You can use the different Zuki Post widgets in all Front page and sidebar widget areas and set the number of posts to show in the widgest. You can use the big post widgets to feature a small number of posts and the medium and small post widgets to teaser a number of your posts on the Front page. The widgets will look best, if you include Featured images for all your posts. Because you can filter the posts by categories, it’s easy to feature different topics of your website on the front page.

Further Theme Features

We also created a default blog layout with a right-aligned sidebar for Zuki. So you can also just use Zuki as a classic, minimal blog theme.

Zuki also comes with a beautiful Quote widget that can be used in all widget areas and with a Social Links menu. You can create a new Social menu under Appearance / Menus by including custom links with URLs to your social profiles. The icons will show up automatically after setting the new Social menu as the “Social Links Footer menu” or by using the “Custom Menu” widget to include the social links one of the sidebars (the name of the menu for your custom menu has to be “Social”).

A further theme highlight is the Header content filter option that you can activate under Appearance / Customize / Theme. Now your readers can easily filter your posts by years, authors, month, categories and tags.

The Zuki Header content filter.

Your Feedback

We hope you will love the flexible Zuki theme options as much as we do and we can’t wait to see the first Zuki themes in action. We are looking forward to your feedback and of course to your suggestions to make the Zuki theme even better!

Hi Hadorn,
thanks so much for your great feedback, so happy to hear that :) You can use WPML for all our themes. The only thing you might need to change is the look of the language switcher. Also it is not built into our themes already, so you would need to use the provided widget or customize e.g. the header of Zuki a little bit yourself.
Best, Ellen

Hi Ellen,
Here you stated that WPML plugin is compatible with all your themes, therefore also ZUKI. I bought Zuki and installed WPML, but I have a big issue, I have already explained in details in the forum (http://themeforum.elmastudio.de/2015/08/06/zuki-date-of-posts-issue-on-homepage/). Please tell me if you plan to fix this issue together with the WPML team. I need a bilingual blog and I bought this theme, because you wrote this is compatible with the WPML theme, but it turned out not to be entirely compatible. Regards, Daniela

I really love the themes you’ve designed and I would be interested in buying the Zuki theme. I just have a question. I would like to do a website in 2 languages (French & English) using folders like mywebiste.ch/fr and mywebsite.com/en. Is Zuki theme compatible with multi-languages plugins such as WPML?

thanks so much for your great feedback, so happy that you like Zuki :) Yes, you can use WPML (we use it here on Elmastudio as well). The only thing you would maybe need to do, is to customize the look of the language switcher (you could also use the language switcher widget, if you like) using custom CSS. But I remember there are documentations regarding the language switcher on the WPML documentation sites.

Hi Ana, thank you sooo much, I’m happy you like Zuki. I’m sorry about the little delay with the theme documentation, I will upload both (the video and text docs) tomorrow. Until then, you can ask any questions here. Best, Ellen

Hi Brett, thanks so much, I’m happy that you like the Zuki theme :) I’m not sure, if this would be possible with a plugin. I think you would probably need to add Custom CSS (position fixed and adapting the margins of the content and so on…).

Hi Antonio, thanks a lot for your comment, yes we will try to release Zuki as soon as possible on WordPress.com, too. Since we are working on this together with the WordPress.com theme team (the themes have to be prepared a little bit differently for WordPress.com), we can not say exactly how long the release will take. But I will update you here in the comment, as soon as I have further news :)
Best, Ellen

thank you so very much for such a wonderful feedback. Yes, we are working on it to get Zuki available for WordPress.com users, too, as soon as possible. It might take a little while though, because we are working in cooperation with WordPress theme developers directly for this one :)

Hi Taichi,
yes, of course, Zuki is included in the theme bundle and you can use it right away just by downloading your theme bundle zip folder again with your download link. In case you lost your download link, just write me a short note and I’ll send it to you again. I also wrote an info email the other day to all theme users, regarding the new theme release. Please let me know, if you did not receive this email, so I can check my email user list and add you to it.
Best, Ellen

Please stop making your so beautiful WordPress templates… I can’t help buying all of them for my websites or my blogs (yeah I bought your bundle last year, but the last releases are just so perfect for my projects).
Thank you again for your work.

I really love your designs. I’ve been using Moka for my blog on wordpress.com but I’m jumping to Zuki as soon as it pops up over there. Such wonderful attention to detail and elegance. Thanks for your great work!

I’m having a problem with the featured image for the slider on the front page. The images have different sizes (heights). I would like to upload two thumbnails, one that would go to the slider and other, to the post itself. The thumbnails for the slider would be prepared (cropped) to have the same height.

Hi Renato,
for the Featured Content Slider a Featured Image size of 1200x800px is recommended. Actually the slider is not working well with different image heights, would it be possible for you to change the image heights?
Best, Ellen

I’m trying to change the behavior of the primary menu so the hamburger menu is always displayed instead of the menu content. But I couldn’t find the exact line to add to overwrite the current behavior. Any idea?

Hi Etienne,
I would recommend a child theme for such changes, since it is probably a bit difficult to overwrite the CSS rules (I have not tried it myself). You would need to look for the Media Queries “@media screen and (min-width: 1260px)” and change the CSS for #site-nav starting from there. Maybe it’s best to try out the changes in a local test installation first.
Best, Ellen

Hi Elma, I finally found a theme where I was looking for! Beautiful design. I know you’re doing your best to put it on wordpress, but have you any idea how long it will take? Is it gonna be available before 1st of September/Oktober? That would be wonderful to know! Keep up the good work.

Hi LV,
thank you sooo much for your wonderful feedback, so happy you like both themes :) At the moment we have no plans to work on an e-Commerce theme, the next themes will be portfolio themes. Which e-Commerce platform are you using?
Best, Ellen

Just a bit of constructive criticism: it would be really useful to have a reference as to what the widgets will look like. You’ve provided a good image to show the names of the different areas in which the widgets can go, but it’s trial and error to find out which widget is the one I want. So on the example page I can see a style of posts which I want on my front page, but there’s no way to tell whether that widget is called Big 1, Medium 2 etc.

Hi Tristan,
thanks so much for your feedback, you are absolutely right. I will think of a solution to do this, maybe like a Cheat Sheet for the Post widgets.
I will update this to the Zuki theme documentation and let you know here in the comments, as soon as it is available.
Thanks a lot!
Best, Ellen

Thank you for this theme, I really like it ;)
I would like to put a link about my older post but I don’t know how to do it. I have chosen in the “Post Content 1” the widget “Zuki:Recent Post Medium” with the 10 last posts and I want a link below to accede to my older posts. Is it possible ?

I absolutely love this theme!!! The only thing that would make it better, is if there was a designated portfolio page. I love that the blog has SO much focal point, and it’s SO easy to browse. I’m a designer though, so I would LOVE a separate work area that fits right in with these theme!

I also noticed a “bug”. When you do a search, and it doesn’t turn up results, it brings up the “Not Found” page. When you’re on that page and go to use the search bar again (in the upper right corner) it’s not the same search bar as on other pages. Hope this helps! :)

I have a question about menu. When i create menu, the link of the meny part, I only have category, page, links. Tags is not on the left side to be dragged to create a menu. How could i solve this problem?

Oh Zuki! – It was love at first sight. Elegantly simple.
A few queries please;
1. Can the widget areas, i.e. top, footer, middle and sidebars, carry advertising of varying banner sizes?
2. Can picture galleries be displayed?
3. Can pictures display captions underneath?
4. Can each category have its own dedicated front page with featured image sliders? (We are a news magazine with different sections/topics)

I’m encountering an issue regarding images:
When there’s a caption to an image in a blog post, part of the markup shows on the home page ([/caption] [caption id="attachment_482" align="aligncenter" width="570"]).
However, it works and doesn’t show in the single post view.

Hi Sheela,
did you have a look at the Zuki video documentation already? If you are using Zuki on WordPress.com there is an extra video for this theme version, too: Zuki on WordPress.com. There I explain how to set up the Custom Zuki Front page.
Best, Ellen

I need help! So I love this theme, it’s exactly the layout I want! However, when I activate it, everything goes out of whack. The layout is completely different than how it’s shows, and it’s very frustrating. What do I do?

Hi Janine,
did you already set up your Custom Zuki front page? If not, the default blog layout shows and there is only a post column with your latest blog posts and a default blog layout.
Please also let me know your site URL so that I can have a look.
Thanks a lot!
Best, Ellen

Hi Rike,
thanks so much for your feedback for Zuki, so happy you like the theme :)
Unfortunately by default the header image can not be set to fullwidth, because of the Header Top menu option. Therefore you would need the following Custom CSS:

I’m new to WordPress, and I have a WordPress.org account. I’m not able to find “Zuki” on the .org site. If I purchase it, will I be able to use it on my .org account? Or is there another vehicle through which I can use the theme?

Hello,
I am very interested in that “Zuki” theme – it looks great!
But one thing me bothers before buying – instead of that tinys line for the name of the site I want to put a lit bigger logo. Is that possible somehow?

Hi Ellen, I am planning to stop using a WP.org site and adopt Zuki (which I love) as my first WP.com site. (1) Is there any way I can import 2 years’ worth of blog posts and keep the original publishing date so they show up historically correct and chronologically in the Archives folder? (2) Also, I am used to using the plugins page and Custom CSS page on my .org site, but I am wondering if these pages also automatically exist in Zuki? If not, how is it possible to work with plugins and code in Zuki? (3) As for making font and color changes, etc, would it be best to purchase the WP upgrade that allows us to make these changes, or is there another way of doing this using code directly in Zuki (for e.g. using code to download different fonts that I can then use on the blog)? Thank you for your help. Elena

Hi Marian,
I’m so sorry for my late reply to your question. I’m very happy that you like the Zuki theme, yes, of course, you can also use the original embed codes for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter widgets. You should be able to just paste the code in a default WordPress text widget in either one of the sidebars or in the Footer widgets of Zuki.
Best, Ellen

I’m very impressed with the Zuki theme. For a travel blogger who’s just starting out it’s affordable and gives me all the options I need. I do have one question though. The is no direct option in the Dashboard to upload plugins. At least I can’t find it. I want to install the Jetpack plugin to get the slider on my front page. You talk about this in the tutorial as well. But I’m no computer genius.. so uploading this Jetpack from the back end of the website is quite a challenge for me.. I need a good explanation or a plugin section on the dashboard to help me out.

One more question. In the tutorial you also show that you can give a background colour to the sections on the front page. I don’t seem to have this. Is this because I bought the cheapest version of the Zuki theme? Do I need an upgrade for this feature to work?

I use zuki theme. some time I don’t want featured image in post. only use thumb nail image.
how to do this.
I try this. add custom css
.postid-#### .featured-image {display:none;}
but not work.
please help me. thank you.

Hi Ellen. I love the look and feel of this theme. We are meeting to choose a theme to launch our news site. Yours is one of three in the running. Is everything up to date and ready to go if we choose this one? We will be getting our web person to build out the theme.

Hi Ken,
thanks so much for your great feedback! Yes, you can use any WordPress plugin that offers an Instagram widget option to include in one of the Zuki sidebars or in the Footer widgets. For Google Ads you can also use a plugin and the sidebar/footer widget areas to include your ads.
Best, Ellen

Hello, I have a few questions. I have been working with Zuki for about two months now. I don’t speak HTML or CSS with any fluency, but I can cut and paste anything. My “featured posts” do not slide. I thought this was supposed to happen automatically on wordpress.com.

Is there a way to hide dates and/or bylines?

Also, is there a list anywhere of sites that use Zuki to see how others are using it?

Hi! I recently bought the Zuki theme with WordPress and I’m absolutely in love with it, however I’ve been trying to filter my recent post widgets by category so that different widgets on my front page can contain recent posts from different categories as you mentioned below the Zuki Custom Posts Widgets header in this post. When I try to edit the visibility of the widget to make it show posts only under a specific category it instead shows no posts at all, I was wondering how I might fix this?
Thank you so much for your help,
Safah.